this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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USAID is bad, tho (https://archive.is/fo7l4)
Hilary Goodfriend, a resident of the country, documents conditional US money in the country - promoting corporate power and bypassing the leftist FMLN government, and mirroring decades of US policy in the region backing capital at the expense of peace and democratic sovereignty. Far from saving lives, the program works to create export markets to siphon away natural resources, domestic talent, and public property.
The end result of this aid program's operation has been the Bukele government currently turning the country into an enormous libertarian nightmare land.
FFS, the second biggest recipient of USAID funds is Israel.
And if you keep repeating the line that US efforts in the Israeli zones of interest were benevolent, I do not know what else can be said to convince you otherwise at this point in history.
Time and again, USAID is a thin wedge of special interest money used to leverage open a country for more direct interventions by American espionage agencies and corporate allies. The shift in Trump's priorities has been to go from covert operations to explicit military assault. The difference between ruffying a person's drink and simply grabbing them by the hair. But the pre-Trump way of doing things wasn't actually helping these countries thrive. Just the opposite, they were pulling vulnerable nations into the US orbit for the purpose of harvesting them later.
PEPFAR alone is credited with saving roughly 25 million lives from HIV/AIDS
The Lancet projected the cuts could cause around 14 million additional deaths by 2030, a third of them children. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext
You can't square "this program never saved lives" with the documented body count of removing it. If USAID were merely a corporate wedge, ending it should have been consequence-free. It wasn't.
Yes, US aid has always served strategic interests. But "aid serves US influence" and "aid saves millions of lives" are both true simultaneously.
PEPFAR walled off life-saving therapies behind patents and distribution bottlenecks, then limited distribution of the medication to countries that submitted to US foreign policy and economic exploitation. These lives weren't saved, they were ransomed.
The documented body count ignores the impact of US sanctions and predatory lending practices, designed to impoverish countries that buck domestic policies.
You fuckers see this crystal clear when a Chinese aid program does it, but you squeeze your eyes shut like oystershells even when you're presented with Americans doing the exact same thing.
PEPFAR operated in countries that routinely vote against the US at the UN. If it was a loyalty program, it was a remarkably bad one.
Now you're just projecting onto me. I've said nothing bad about Chinese aid, at all, ever.
The consistent position isn't "US aid bad, Chinese aid bad" or the reverse. It's that aid can serve strategic influence and deliver real material benefit simultaneously.
Chinese built hospitals and vaccine shipments helped people even though Belt and Road serves Beijing's interests. PEPFAR saved lives even though it served Washington's.
You are the one being hypocritical. You treat motive as disqualifying only when the flag is American.
Let me ask you this directly: Does Chinese aid save zero lives the same way you're saying USAID did not?
Ah, so that justifies taking a chainsaw to it? Likely violating many laws and costing many lives?
It doesn't justify anything. But the hype the organization gets is entirely undeserved. It's akin to defending the "Oil For Food" program under Kofi Annan by just shouting "It's for food! Do you want people to starve?!" over and over again, without understanding what the program does or why it ended in scandal.
Yea, I'm not buying your BS dude. It didn't end in scandal. It was scandalously ended. Whatever point you're making, about whomever supposedly over-hyped USAID is totally beside the point.
Are you attempting to Johnny Cocraine a $21B embezzlement?
I'm not even sure which change of subject you're trying to skewer me on, you've lost the plot mate
You really might want to research what you're arguing
I haven't argued anything but the illegal and reckless nature of DOGE. You are arguing and insinuating A LOT
Isn't a defense of the horrible policies imposed through USAID
Yea so that's not the topic. You want it to be. You should make your own post
The "1 life every 10 seconds" claim is fallacious. Musk is (inadvertently) correct. The money Kristof cites goes to gatekeepers, not relief workers. And the net impact of the so-called aid, particularly in Palestine, Jordan, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, are higher mortality rates caused by these foreign policy initiatives.
Just straight up, handing out aid money to Israel Settlers does not reduce the death toll in the West Bank. Just the opposite. Subsidizing food exports from El Salvador so Walmart can buy cheaper groceries wholesale does not reduce famine inside the country.
You are being lied to with these statistics. You are being lied to by the NYT.